Authors Forum: Property, Freedom & Society

0:00Our final presentation is going to be by Stefan Kinsella. He is the editor of Libertarian Papers and the co-editor of the book, Property, Freedom, and Society. Stefan? Thank you, Mark. It's nice to be here. I've been coming to the Austrian Scholars Conference for over 10 years, I think, and I think this is the first time I've woken up early enough to make it to the authors forum. So, good strategy. So, I'm here to talk about the book that I co-edited with Guido Holzmann, who can't be here today. It's Property, Freedom, Women's Society, Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

0:47What I have showing here are some pictures of the ceremony in which the book was given out. The book is a personal book, as testriests are, and so I'd like to go into a little bit of history of how the book came about. Guido and I have been really good friends for about 15 years. We met at the airport at Atlanta in 1996 or so, coming to one of these events, both of us coming here primarily to meet, to be with Hans and speak with Hans, and we've both been increasingly influenced by Hans and friends with him over the years, and he's been a mentor to us and to many others, and a few years back Guido and I thought of the idea that it was appropriate and necessary to do a festriff for Hans. There are many very good festrifts One of my favorites is the Rothbard, which I've devoured and which is a wonderful fester of Man Economy and Liberty.

1:43So about three years ago, we started planning the project in earnest. Guido, with his German mentality, thought we should divide the world into two, and I would take America and he would take the rest of the world. And it worked out to be about half and half, so about half of the contributors and Hans' associates, friends, colleagues, former students were from America and about half were from various parts of Europe and other parts of the globe. And that worked out well. I am an editor of some books, some legal books for Oxford and I deal with authors quite often from law firms all around the world submitting papers. paper, so I'm used to juggling people who submit things late, and so that was the case here.

2:33But we actually had very good turnout. It worked out well. It worked out on time. The plan was we chose the title. We had several alternative titles, but Hans is pretty literal and straight speaking sometimes, and he was the one who suggested the title for my against intellectual property article. He said call it against intellectual property. That's what it is. Okay. Good idea. And when he founded his Property and Freedom Society a few years ago, I remember Agito and I were there for the founding meeting in 2006 in Bodrum, Turkey. And before that, Hans was kicking around ideas for the title, and we were going to call it the Mount Ararat Society in competition with Mont Pelerin. Ararat is nearby, but it sounded maybe – had some of the wrong connotations. But Hans said, well, we're property and freedom, and it's a society, so property and freedom society.

3:28But the plan was Hans was turning 60 in September of 2009 last year, and we knew he would be at the Mises University in late July last year, so it was about a month from his birthday. ." So we wanted to be secret and it was amazingly kept secret even though David Gordon contributed the chapter to the book. And so everyone was in on it except for Hans, his wife was in on it and we had a very nice reception which the pictures there from the reception at Judge Denson's house. So it was a very nice reception and I think Hans thought it was going to be a little birthday Party for him, but it turned out to be more than that. The book is full of wonderful essays, some are personal, some are, for once I wrote something in there not on NLF property, and Guido read a wonderful chapter, Joseph Salerno has a classic article from the past in there, and it's just a nice collection of articles from all over the world and on different topics

4:34of Hans' Interest Areas. And another good thing about the book was we published it. It was actually, I published it from my iPhone at the reception because it was ready to go on a PDF file online. The blog post was ready so I loaded up my little browser and I hit publish. So that was a pretty cool high tech way to do it. And we handed it out there. So the book is here. It's available on the Mises Institute site for free, and you can order it as well. So I'll take any questions after. Thank you.